A GI bride who left Malvern in 1945 to start a new life in America has returned for only the second time in 50 years.

Mary Hoerstkamp met up with her brother, Graham Collings, in an emotional family reunion.

Mary married her American GI Virgil Kleineinheider at St Matthias' Church in 1945, a few days after VE Day.

She had been working at the radar establishment and he was with the American forces based at the military hospital in Malvern Wells.

Clothing coupons and food rationing meant Mary had a second-hand wedding dress and a borrowed veil. The two-tier cake was brought down on a packed troop train all the way from Yorkshire, by a friend who worked in a bakery.

She carried a horseshoe of roses sent by Graham, who in May 1945 was still in the army overseas.

Two years later, she sailed for America with her baby son Paul to join her husband.

"It took seven days to cross the Atlantic back then. I didn't think I'd ever see England or my family again," said Mary.

Like many GI brides, Mary's initial impressions of America were not good and she was terribly homesick.

"My in-laws' house was a log cabin with no electricity or running water. It was a culture shock and at first I hated it," explained Mary, who missed Malvern's shops and amenities.

The hardest thing at the end of the war, said Mary, was being surrounded by Germans.

Her husband's home town in Washington, Missouri, was peopled almost entirely by second generation German emigrees.

"It was very hard and I was unhappy and lonely but I didn't tell anyone," said Mary. Her brother Graham had no idea and says if he had known, he would have told her to come straight home. Mary, who has since remarried, eventually grew to love her adopted country and now feels as much American as British.

"But I'll always love Malvern and it's wonderful being back," she said.

Mary keeps up with what is happening by reading the on-line version of the Malvern Gazette.

Mary and Graham were reunited for the first time in 1990, when she returned to Malvern on a visit.

Her son, Paul Kleineinheider, who had never met his English relations until this week, accompanied her latest trip.